Eugenio Montale Quotes

I really write for people.

I find you write with one person in mind. Usually for me that one person is my wife, because she's my most severe critic and understands best what I'm trying to do.

You don't write a book to show off.

I've sat down and written with a more or less supportable or insupportable idea or thing to say, and it ends. When it's not 200 pages, people want to call it a story. I guess they're entitled to do that. In my view, if it were a supportable idea, it would have gone 200 pages, and it didn't.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it.

I'm not trying to do conceptual art.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

In my mind, I'm writing for everybody.

I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

What I'm trying to do is to write a story. If you take something from it, that's wonderful; if you don't, that's wonderful as well.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

But if you're talking about fine art work, then I think you have to ask yourself some pretty deep questions about why it is you want to take pictures and what it is you want to say.

You want an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.

I don't write for any particular kind of person.

Created stuff is meant to be shared. That’s why the creative person created it. Why else do creative people exist?

Who are you writing this for? For a commercial reason, or because you want to make great art and give it to your fans?

Ever since I started writing music, I've wanted to know what the songs are about and to be able to tell stories.